How To Measure SEO ROI

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Measuring the performance and success of your SEO campaigns is a vital part of determining if your resources are being used effectively. Many marketers don’t realize there is a way to track SEO success in a measurable way. Read on to learn how to measure SEO ROI, and how doing so can help your business.

Justifying SEO Efforts

The purpose of calculating actual or potential ROI is to justify your business’s existing or planned SEO efforts.

Potential ROI can be calculated to determine whether it’s worthwhile to increase SEO efforts or, if none have been implemented yet, to begin new SEO campaigns. Actual ROI can be calculated to justify continuing your SEO efforts, helping you decide if your SEO program is benefiting your business.

Benefits of Measuring SEO ROI

So why measure SEO ROI? Here are a few ways it can help your marketing strategy:

Ease of comparison: By measuring ROI, you can compare the success of SEO efforts against paid media efforts on a single metric.

Investment opportunities: An ROI measurement can help you predict how your ROI might increase if you funneled a greater portion of your budget into your SEO efforts.

Setting goals: Measuring ROI can also allow you to set more informed, realistic, effective goals for your SEO campaigns. Equipped with detailed data about the efficiency of your SEO efforts, you can better understand ways to improve in the future.

Elements of the SEO ROI Equation

There are several factors to consider when measuring SEO ROI. The equation consists of these parts:

The value (estimated or actual) of each visit from organic search. If your site has conversions, you can use the value of a conversion, such as lead generation or ecommerce.

The cost of investment in SEO efforts. This could be a percentage of salary of the person or people on staff that are working on SEO. It can also be the amount of money spent on the SEO agency who handles your campaigns.

The increase in organic traffic since SEO efforts were implemented. If no SEO efforts are in play yet and you are calculating potential ROI, this will be the factor that you can “play around with” to see the change in ROI at different SEO success levels. If you’re calculating ROI based on conversions, you’ll want to find your conversion numbers as opposed to traffic.

Keep in mind that if your business is a seasonal one, you’ll want to draw your data from a long enough data period to smooth out the effects of seasonality.

The Bottom Line

SEO is a measurable investment in your business, just like paid search! Calculating the ROI of those efforts can illustrate to others how valuable SEO is (or will be) to the success of your business.

To learn more about how to implement strategies that drive ROI of your SEO efforts, download our ebook!